In a milestone for artificial intelligence, a computer has beaten a human champion at a strategy game that requires "intuition" rather than brute processing power to prevail, its makers said Wednesday.
Dubbed...

Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity is about to celebrate its 100th anniversary, and his revolutionary hypothesis has withstood the test of time, despite numerous expert attempts to find flaws.
"Einstein...

The remains of five archbishops of Canterbury have been accidentally discovered by builders in a hidden tomb beneath a London church, site developers said yesterday.
Some 20 lead coffins were discovered...

The first major retrospective of gay British art opens this week at the Tate Britain gallery in London, featuring a portrait of Oscar Wilde next to his prison cell door.
"Queer British Art 1861-1967"...

From Walkmans to iPhones and classic cars to robotic arms, London's new Design Museum will offer a journey through the world of contemporary design when it opens its doors to the public next week.
The...

Media

Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks on Saturday made his first public appearance in Copenhagen after surviving an attack last month in the Danish capital, local media reported.

The 68-year-old cartoonist, who whipped up an outcry across the Muslim world with his 2007 sketch of the Prophet Mohammed as a dog, had lived in a secret location since the February 14 attempt on his life.

A Dane of Palestinian origin had fired a series of shots at a Copenhagen cultural centre that was hosting a debate on free speech attended by the cartoonist, killing a filmmaker.

The gunman later shot dead a Jewish man outside a synagogue before he was killed by police.

On Saturday, Vilks emerged in public to receive a prize awarded by a Danish association promoting free speech called Trykkefrihedsselskabet.

The ceremony was held under tight police surveillance at the Christianborg Castle, which also houses the parliament and other Danish institutions, Danish news agency Ritzau reported.

Women are far more exposed to disasters than men given their frontline roles in the home and in healthcare, the UN says, arguing that improving gender equality is key to saving lives.

Globally, women and children are up to 14 times more likely than men to die in a disaster, according to UN Population Fund account executive Lamar Dawson.

"Women are more exposed to disasters," United Nations Development Programme Administrator Helen Clark told AFP on the sidelines of a once-in-a-decade UN conference on disaster risk reduction in Japan.

"There is a range of reasons," said Clark, a former New Zealand Prime Minister. "They may be trapped at home, they may be caring for sick or disabled family members, young children.

"In some societies where these disasters hit, the culture may be that the woman doesn't leave the home. So if she can't leave the home how can she escape?"

Clark was speaking as aid agencies and governments scrambled to get help to Vanuatu, where dozens are feared dead after the Pacific nation was raked by a huge cyclone on Friday.

A state of emergency was put in place over the weekend amid reports entire villages had been "blown away".

The calamity in the Pacific gave greater resonance to the Sendai meeting, which runs until Wednesday, where Clark said policymakers must work on improving the lot of women.

"The issues will (be) how we make sure that women are fully engaged, and (the conference should) argue for women's empowerment and full equality, because why should they suffer?" she said.

"It's a huge issue" and has to "be integrated in the Sendai outcome".

- Caring for families -

Remi Sogunro, who represents the United Nations Population Fund in Liberia, said women bore the brunt not only of natural disasters like that unfolding in Vanuatu, but in human catastrophes like the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

"Women are caregivers at home, and when their... families are sick, they take care of them," he said.

Around 25,000 people are known to have been infected with Ebola since the latest outbreak began in December 2013. Around 10,000 of them have died.

In Liberia, one of the worst-hit countries, thousands of people were infected including 300 health workers, said Sogunro.

"Half of (the health workers) died. Most of them are nurses, some of them are midwives, a few of them are senior medical doctors. Many of these were women," he said.

"The women were trying to help the country to stop the Ebola virus and they died in the course of duty. So you can see why it's really very important to talk about women in the Ebola forefront," he said.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that even in developed countries like Japan, much more needed to be done to get women more involved in reducing the impact of disasters.

After numerous attempts unsuccessfully to establish contacts with the daughter who lives with her father in New York, the Brazilian who lives in Florida, USA, Adriana Paula de Oliveira, was able to speak, via telephone, with her ex-husband, Marcelo Luiz da Silva, who once again did not allow his daughter to talk with her mother.

In one of the attempts to talk to her daughter by phone, and Adrianawas used the call never be answered, Adriana was surprised on January 21th, at 4:00pm when the phone was answering, when her ex-husband answered the call and as soon as he realized that it was the mother of his daughter, Marcelo, who is also Brazilian, raised uphis voice and started to speaking English, accusing her of lying about the article that she had an interview with the press.

Baffled and by instinct, Adriana has managed to write an excerpt of the conversation with her ex-husband, and reported to the News Radar, as was the conversation between the two.

"He answered the phone, then I asked in Portuguese, Marcelo? Marcelo? Then he responded rudely and in English: myself, why? There's another Marcelo? AI I commented that I was surprised with him answering the phone, and asked to speak to my daughter, he said I couldn’t talk to her because I put all those lies in the paper, and that our daughter was 17 years and that she is ' free ' to talk with me when she wants to. Before the allegations and contradictions started questioning what lies he's talking about, "said Adriana.

Her ex-husband claims that the mother owes child support and the statements made by her mother in an interview for the News Radar, are liars.

Under the pending charges with American justice, Adriana” requested a certificate letter to the Queens Family Court of New York, in order to know if there really was or have any pending case. And is there was or is a pending, I have some debt to the USA Government I have complete interest in resolving," said Adriana.

The Family Court of Queens, New York reported that:You have no case in any family proceedings pending on behalf of Adriana until January 14, 2015, as follows below in official document:

“Mrs. Adriana De OliveiraThe records of Queens County Family Court, show NO upcoming court dates for any of your cases.Record Room”

British tabloid The Sun published a photo of a winking topless model on Thursday, rebutting reports it had ended the controversial tradition that has featured in the newspaper since 1970.

Newspaper The Times, which like the Sun is part of billionaire media tycoon Rupert Murdoch's News UK group, reported on Tuesday that the page three feature had been shelved and the news was welcomed by government ministers.

Nevertheless, The Sun featured a photo of a bare-breasted blonde woman in its Thursday edition under the words "clarifications and corrections".

"Further to recent reports in all other media outlets, we would like to clarify that this is Page 3 and this is a picture of Nicole, 22, from Bournemouth," the caption to the photograph read.

Precious scrolls blackened by the eruption of the Vesuvius volcano in AD 79 may become readable again, thanks to 21st century technology, scientists said on Tuesday.

Hundreds of papyrus scrolls believed to have been authored by Greek philosophers were found in the Roman town of Herculaneum, which was hit in the same eruption that destroyed the town of Pompeii.

Whereas Pompeii was buried under a thick layer of ash, nearby Herculaneum met a somewhat different fate -- it was exposed to a roiling blast of volcanic gas.

The furnace-like heat burned its citizens alive and turned the writings into pitch-black, brittle rolls.

The carbonised manuscripts, part of the only library to have survived from the classical world, were found 260 years ago in the ruins of a huge villa believed to have been owned by a wealthy Roman statesman, Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus.

Now stored at the National Library of Naples, they are so fragile that the slightest touch can cause them to crumble.

Adding to the problem is that the letters on the papyrus were written in ink made from soot. On the blackened background, they are nearly invisible to the naked eye.

So many papyri have been damaged or destroyed in attempts to pierce their secrets that archaeologists abandoned the quest in frustration.

But, in a study published in the journal Nature Communications, Italian researchers offer hope that the enigmatic texts may be revealed for the first time in nearly 2,000 years.

- 'Readable within a decade' -

"It's always hard to make a precise prediction, but with resources, the scrolls should be readable within the next decade," lead scientist Vito Mocella told AFP.

Mocella, who works at the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems (IMM) in Naples, led a team to probe the scrolls non-invasively using X-ray phase-contrast tomography -- a scanner also used in medicine to image soft tissue.

The technique exploits the fact that different materials absorb X-rays differently.

The researchers wrote a purpose-made algorithm to process the signals returned from the beams, seeking to tease out contrasts between the papyrus and the inked letters.

They tested their innovation on pieces of a scroll that had been unrolled in fragments in 1986.

Africa Cup of Nations hosts Equatorial Guinea will be pressed to get off to a winning start when they face Congo Brazzaville in the tournament's opening game in Group A on Saturday.

The curtain-raiser to the competition in the country's largest city Bata will be followed later in the day by a meeting of the group's other two sides, Burkina Faso and Gabon, who clash again after doing battle in qualifying.

Equatorial Guinea rescued this year's tournament by agreeing to act as hosts after the late withdrawal of Morocco due to Ebola fears, and their fans will now expect Nzalang Nacional to match the exploits of three years ago, when they beat all the odds to reach the last eight of the same competition on home soil.

Nevertheless, they were initially disqualified from the competition for fielding an ineligible player, and their build-up has been somewhat chaotic, with Argentine Esteban Becker only named as the country's new coach last week in place of Andoni Goikoetxea, whose contract expired recently and was not renewed.

Jihadist groups tied to the men who attacked France's Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Paris kosher supermarket are waging an increasingly sophisticated propaganda campaign targeting Western recruits, experts say.

Organisations ranging from the Islamic State (IS) group in Iraq and Syria to Al-Qaeda and even the Somali Al-Shebab group have sought to exploit the anonymity and reach of the Internet to attract Western members.

They urge recruits to come to the battlefield, but also encourage them to carry out violence at home.

Jihadist groups have targeted Western recruits for decades, but the Internet has revolutionised their approach, according to Clint Watts, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

"Thirty years ago it took a long time to get everyone to Afghanistan" where jihadists were fighting Soviet troops, he said.

"Now they propagate through social media, that's why it can happen so quickly, they can rapidly ramp up recruitment."

The three men involved in the France attack appear to be linked to different jihadist groups.

The two brothers who targeted Charlie Hebdo were linked to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which is based in Yemen.

The third attacker appears to have pledged allegiance to IS.

Jihadists use a variety of media for their message.

Since 2010, AQAP has produced the English-language "Inspire" magazine, released periodically in PDF format with articles expounding on its ideology and instructing readers on how to carry out attacks.

In recent issues it singled out France as a target and put Charlie Hebdo's editor-in-chief Stephane Charbonnier, who was killed in last week's attack, on a "Most Wanted" list.

Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, publishes slickly produced video, as well as photos and statements, through official accounts on Twitter and the video-sharing website YouTube.

And Somalia's Al-Shebab has frequently used Twitter to reach out to potential followers.

But perhaps no group has harnessed the power of the Internet as effectively as IS, which eschewed the password-protected forums preferred by Al-Qaeda in favour of popular social media sites.

It quickly established a presence on Facebook and Twitter and even allows its fighters to converse publicly with potential recruits on question-and-answer sites like Ask.fm.

"Islamic State has really honed its media strategy," said Charlie Winter, a researcher at the Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremist think tank.

"It has a standardised format, which makes it easy to identify as official Islamic State propaganda. It is very productive, it has an output rate of four or five videos a week," he said.

The group also relies on "a wide, decentralised network of people who are almost obsessive in their need to share things" to distribute its material, Winter added.

IS and its backers also use high-profile methods, like this week's hacking of the Pentagon's Central Command Twitter feed, to gain notice.

Experts say foreign recruits play a key role in jihadist outreach.

Most prominent jihadist groups now advertise their operations in Western languages and often feature videos of Westerners describing life on the battlefield.

"They are a way to get through to a population that might otherwise be difficult to reach," Winter said.

European coast guards on Friday secured a cargo ship with 450 migrants on board, which was drifting off the coast of Italy in rough seas. The vessel was towed to Crotone port, FRANCE 24 has learned.

A dramatic, hours-long rescue mission in choppy waters ended Friday morning, when the Italian navy took control of the 73-metre-long (240-foot-long) Sierra Leone-registered Ezadeen, which had been abandoned by its crew off the southwestern coast of Italy.

Six coast guard officers were lowered from a helicopter onto the deck of the vessel, according to an Italian naval official.

FRANCE 24 has learned that the Ezadeen was towed to the Italian port of Crotone.

Earlier Friday, the AP reported that an Icelandic coast guard ship, part of a new European patrol force to aid migrants at sea, was responsible for towing the cargo vessel to Italy.Crewless ship with children and pregnant women on board

Children and pregnant women were among the migrants, most of whom were believed to be Syrian, according to Italian Coast Guard Cmdr. Filippo Marini. The Sierra-Leone-flagged cargo ship apparently set sail from Turkey, he said.

A migrant on board the drifting vessel had called for help saying, “we're without crew, we're heading toward the Italian coast and we have no one to steer,'' Marini told reporters.

Prior to losing power, the almost 50-year-old ship had been moving at a brisk seven knots and had been spotted by a coast guard plane 80 miles offshore shortly after nightfall.

The Ezadeen is the second cargo ship full of migrants to be abandoned while still sailing this week. Days earlier, the Italian Coast Guard in a daring attempt, lowered officials onto another, Moldovan-flagged cargo vessel so they could take control of the ship, which was only a few miles from crashing into the Italian coast.

More than 170,000 migrants were intercepted or needed rescue by the Italian navy, coast guard and air force patrols last year. This apparently new technique by smugglers of abandoning a ship after setting it on a crash course complicates rescue efforts, Marini told Italian state radio, "but the important thing is there are lives to be saved.''

The migrant boat dramas have come as Italy grapples with the aftermath of the Norman Atlantic ferry disaster in which at least 13 people died following an onboard fire that erupted before dawn on Sunday in waters off Albania.

They also come after a record year for people fleeing conflict and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia attempting to reach Europe by sea.

The primary general immediate flight from the UK to China outside London takes off on Monday, as Cathay Pacific dispatches its Manchester-Hong Kong administration.

It is an iconic issue. In gathered southeast England, moves to stretch limit are in halt. The UK's enormous commonplace airplane terminals, in the mean time, are caught up with boosting long-separation flights, opening up immediate courses to the billions-solid fare markets of Asia.

Stanley Chan, of Chi Yip, a gathering that runs and supplies Chinese shops and restaurants over the UK, said the Manchester flight — which takes 12 hours and will run four times each week — will help grow the business. "Some time recently, holders needed to stay overnight in Frankfurt, Paris or Amsterdam. Time is cash.

"In the event that we can discover items the Chinese need, we will fare and offer there. They have had a considerable measure of sustenance outrages and it is a boundless business sector."

The initiative group of sports journalists launched a campaign "Knock terrorism out - save Ukraine!" in support of the volunteer battalions and the Ukrainian army, who are bravely fighting to the East of this country with externally supported the illegal armed groups and the occupation by Russian warriors.

The promotion is available to all comers, which are able to hit a punching bag. One of the sports projectile not - come any substitute, from wood to a sparring partner. Fists, feet, head - improvisation is encouraged. And, of course, no sexual discrimination among participants, the organizers also expect girls!

The project was already joined by former world and European champion in Boxing Alina Shaternikova. The first athlete of the representatives of the Ukrainian Boxing supported the campaign by writing a short video, thereby completing the mandatory part of it. Alina, who is also Vice-President of the National League of professional Boxing Ukraine, worked the combination on the bag - it, by design, a symbol of terror and war, which are now taking place in the East. Your participation in the promotion Shaternikova without the slightest hesitation showed citizenship and expressed towards those who unleashed the armed conflict in Ukraine, and on the conscience of anyone responsible for hundreds of thousands of victims in this confrontation.

Supported the initiative and world champion 2011 in the amateurs, bronze medalist of the Olympic games in London, and now a promising boxer-professional Taras Shelestyuk. The athlete, as Shaternikova, sent financial help to the needs of the Ukrainian soldiers, and passed the baton to his colleagues from the already legendary national team of Ukraine in Boxing - Alexander Usik, Alexander Cloves, Eugene Hitrovo, Vasyl Lomachenko, Denis Berenice and Paul-Ogneslaw Ishchenko.